Building on the Past: Researching House History at OHS

For Tammy McCarty and Nicholas Stark, a restoration project on the porch of their 1905 foursquare house on the Willamette Bluffs in North Portland prompted their house history research. When McCarty and Stark moved into the home eight years ago, the property came with a memory box filled with mementos dating back to the first residents of the house. The memory box was originally found during a renovation in the 1980s, housed in a box of old papers in the attic floor, and subsequent generations of residents continued to add their own memories to the box. This connection to past residents inspired McCarty and Stark to remain true to the original character of their house. Their goal as owners and stewards of the home is to, “make the house worth it to somebody wanting to live in it 100 years from now.”

As part of the planning for the extensive restorations to the porch, McCarty visited OHS in search of anything that might tell them more about the house as it existed 100 years ago. As she sorted through numerous library collections in search of elusive photographs of her home, McCarty quickly discovered that house history research is a bit of a treasure hunt: “I searched, and searched, and searched. I would say months. Because I really wanted to find a picture of the house.” Like many hopeful researchers, McCarty learned a lot about the Willamette Bluffs and the Overlook neighborhood, but the closest photographic documentation she was able to locate was an aerial image from the 1940s that included the house in the far distance. Her luck changed a few months ago when a friend sent a message saying, “this looks an awful lot like your place,” along with a link to an OHS blog post titled, “A 1905 “Slice of Life” View of Portland’s East Side.” McCarty and Stark recognized their house immediately. Even the cloud of steam rising from the train in the background echoed their familiar view of the Willamette River.

This story of serendipitously finding what you are looking for, just as you are about to give up, is a common theme in archival research. It is part of what makes the process so rewarding. In a world where so much information is instantly accessible, the slow, methodical, and at times frustrating process of conducting archival research is a refreshing change of pace. Due to their fragile nature and because they were part of an unprocessed collection, these photographs of McCarty’s house were not available for research when she initially visited OHS. Ongoing work to process and digitize collections, such as the glass negatives of early Portland residential scenes, has made accessible this piece of Portland’s residential architectural history.

This same sense of serendipity is shared across the desk by the archivists caring for the collections. So much of our job is untangling the many lost pieces of provenance and context that help us connect researchers with the right boxes in the collections. We often do not have the time to follow every thread to unlock the full story behind each photograph, but community sleuths have helped us identify locations for several photographs in the Glass negatives of Early Portland residential scenes collection.